The Fall of Tenochtitlan
Cortés had 500 soldiers. Tenochtitlan had 300,000 people. Smallpox decided the math.
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Five hundred Spaniards took an empire of millions. That is the sentence, and it has never added up.
At the siege that ended it, the Spanish force was maybe nine hundred men. Standing with them were somewhere between seventy five thousand and two hundred thousand indigenous soldiers, who had their own reasons, their own commanders, and their own terms.
And the other half of the story, the one about a king who mistook a Spanish captain for a returning god and handed over his empire, does not appear in a single Nahuatl source written before the conquest. It was assembled afterwards, to explain something that otherwise needed explaining.
Scene 1No way home
August, fifteen nineteen. On the coast at Veracruz, Hernan Cortes destroys his own ships. Burned or scuttled, the accounts differ. The effect is that five hundred men, sixteen horses and a few cannon cannot leave.
They march inland toward a city none of them has seen, on reports from coastal people who say it is bigger than anything in Spain.
It was. Tenochtitlan sat on an island in a lake, joined to the shore by three causeways, with somewhere between two and three hundred thousand people in it. Seville, the largest city in Spain, had sixty thousand.
One of the soldiers, Bernal Diaz, wrote his account almost fifty years later, as an old man, and he could still recall arriving at the edge of it.
· The True History of the Conquest of New Spain · 1568
“We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and temples and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry.”
Scene 2The people who fought him first
On the way, in September, the Spaniards enter the territory of Tlaxcala, and the Tlaxcalans attack them. Four battles in two weeks.
Then the Tlaxcalan senate does something else. It stops, and it negotiates.
This is not naivety and it is not awe. Tlaxcala had been at war with the Aztec alliance for decades, blockaded out of salt and cotton and cacao, and bled by ritual wars whose purpose was to take its people for sacrifice.
Their leading general argued for fighting on and was overruled. The senate decided that these strangers were the instrument that could end the thing strangling them.
From that point the army marching on Tenochtitlan is overwhelmingly Tlaxcalan.
Scene 3The eighth of November
Moctezuma receives Cortes on the southern causeway and takes him into the city as a guest.
What was happening in that meeting is contested by every source that describes it. The Spanish version has Moctezuma conceding his empire on the spot.
The likelier reading is that he was buying time. He housed them in a palace, fed them, watched them, and tried to work out what they were and how many more were coming.
Scene 4The festival
In June fifteen twenty, Cortes leaves the city to deal with a Spanish force sent to arrest him, because he is operating without authorisation and the governor of Cuba wants him in chains.
The officer he leaves in command attacks a religious festival and kills the Aztec nobility attending it.
The city rises. Moctezuma dies, by Spanish hands or by stones thrown from his own people depending on which account you read.
On the thirtieth of June the Spaniards fight their way out along a causeway at night, losing six hundred of their own men and a great many allies. They called it the night of sorrows.
This is how Nahua informants, decades later, described what the newcomers were like around gold.
· Florentine Codex · c. 1577
“They seized the gold as if they were monkeys, their faces flushed. Like hungry pigs they craved that gold.”
Scene 5What actually took the city
They came back the following year with more allies and a fleet of small ships built in pieces and carried over the mountains, and they cut the causeways and the fresh water.
But the thing that decided it had already arrived. Smallpox came ashore with the expedition sent to arrest Cortes, carried by an enslaved African man in its ranks, and it went through Tenochtitlan between October and January.
It killed the emperor who had replaced Moctezuma, eighty days into his reign. It killed commanders, priests, and the people who knew how the city was run, in the months when the city most needed them.
The siege lasted about three months. More than two hundred and forty thousand people died in it.
Bernal Diaz again, on the end of it.
· The True History of the Conquest of New Spain · 1568
“The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others swam or drowned in the waters of that wide lake. So great was the suffering that it was beyond understanding.”
Five accounts
Five accounts of two years.
victorSpanish Conquistador
The conquistadors
The first is the one that reached Europe, and it was written by a man who needed a pardon.
Cortes had no authority to conquer anything. He had been sent to trade and explore. He solved that by founding a town on the coast, having its council, which was made up of his own men, appoint him captain general, and then writing directly to the king over the head of the governor who had commissioned him.
His five letters to Charles the Fifth are the foundation of every Spanish account of the conquest, and they are also a legal brief. They are arguing that what he did was lawful, necessary, and owed to the crown.
A man in that position needs the empire to have surrendered rather than been taken, and he needs the natives who did most of the fighting to be an auxiliary detail.
Read the full account
Narrative
Cortés wrote his first letter to Charles V from Veracruz in July 1519. He had no authorization for conquest. The governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, had commissioned him only to trade and explore. Cortés resolved the legal problem by founding a municipality, La Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz, and having its newly appointed town council (his own men) elect him captain-general. It was a bureaucratic sleight of hand that gave him direct authority from the Crown, bypassing Velázquez. Cortés was 34 years old, a failed law student from Medellín, Extremadura, with fourteen years of Caribbean colonial experience and an instinct for legal fiction.
The five letters Cortés sent to Charles V between 1519 and 1526, the Cartas de relación, are the primary Spanish narrative of the conquest. They are also calculated political documents. Cortés framed every action as service to God and Crown. The destruction of Aztec temples became a crusade. The subjugation of indigenous peoples became their liberation from human sacrifice. The Aztecs sacrificed an estimated 20,000 people annually at the Templo Mayor, a practice that genuinely horrified the Spanish and provided moral justification for the conquest. Cortés offered Moctezuma a deal: stop the sacrifices, accept Christ, acknowledge Charles V. Moctezuma agreed to the last, temporized on the first two, and was dead within months.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a foot soldier who participated in the conquest and wrote his account forty years after the siege, provides the ground-level view. His True History of the Conquest of New Spain is the most detailed eyewitness account. Díaz describes the first sight of Tenochtitlan with undisguised awe: the causeways, the markets, the temple pyramids, the aqueducts bringing fresh water from Chapultepec. The market at Tlatelolco, he wrote, was larger than those of Rome and Constantinople. He also describes the aftermath of the siege with something close to horror: the stench of corpses, the streets choked with the dead, the surviving inhabitants "so thin and yellow and dirty and stinking" that the Spaniards could barely look at them.
The conquistador narrative is one of daring and divine providence. Cortés burned his ships, defeated the Tlaxcalans and turned them into allies, survived the Noche Triste, regrouped, and took a city of 300,000 with fewer than a thousand Spaniards. The role of epidemic disease, indigenous alliances, and Aztec political fragmentation is minimized. In Cortés's telling, the conquest was a feat of will. In his second letter, he informed Charles V: "After God, we owe the conquest of New Spain to Doña Marina." La Malinche (translator, advisor, and mother of his son Martín) was the only indigenous person he credited by name.
Arguments
- The conquest was legitimate service to God and the Spanish Crown
- Human sacrifice by the Aztecs morally justified Spanish intervention
- Cortés's strategic genius (alliances, legal maneuvering, military adaptation) was decisive
- The city's fall was providential, guided by divine will
Sources
- Letters from Mexico
- The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
- Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary
vanquishedAztec / Mexica
The Mexica
The second account is the one from inside the city, and it reaches us through an unusual route.
A Franciscan friar spent decades interviewing Nahua elders and scribes, in Nahuatl, and produced an enormous encyclopedia of their world, including their account of the war.
So the defeated side's version survives because a member of the institution that had just destroyed them sat down and wrote it out in their own language.
It is not a pure source and it does not claim to be. It was collected a generation later, in a colony, from people who had lived through the loss. The omens it opens with, the fire in the sky, the burning temple, are almost certainly added afterwards, the way people rebuild a catastrophe into a story with warnings in it.
What it records without any of that framing is concrete. The starvation in the siege. The smell. The water.
Read the full account
Narrative
The Aztec account of the conquest survives primarily through the Florentine Codex (compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún from Nahua informants between 1545 and 1590) and the anonymous account known as the "Broken Spears," collected and translated by Miguel León-Portilla. These are post-conquest documents, shaped by colonial conditions, but they preserve a perspective absent from Spanish sources.
The Nahua accounts describe the omens: a column of fire in the sky, the temple of Huitzilopochtli bursting into flame, a bird with a mirror in its head. Modern historians treat these as post-hoc constructions, narrative devices that made the inexplicable comprehensible. What the accounts describe without mythological framing is the practical crisis. Moctezuma sent ambassadors bearing gold to the coast. The gold was intended as a diplomatic gesture. In Mesoamerican tradition, lavish gifts signaled power, not submission. The Spanish interpreted it as a sample of what awaited them inland. The cultural misreading was mutual and fatal.
The Toxcatl massacre of May 1520 (when Alvarado's men attacked unarmed nobles during a religious festival, killing hundreds) radicalized the Aztec population. The Spanish accounts claim Alvarado acted preemptively against a rumored attack. The Nahua accounts describe an unprovoked slaughter: "They slashed the drummer's arms. They cut off his head, and it rolled across the floor. They attacked all the celebrants, stabbing them, spearing them, striking them with their swords." After Toxcatl, negotiation was finished.
Cuauhtémoc's 80-day defense of Tenochtitlan was a military achievement measured against impossible odds. The Aztecs adapted to Spanish weapons: they dug canals across streets to trap cavalry, built barricades, developed tactics for pulling Spaniards off horses. They fought at night when Spanish crossbows and harquebuses were less effective. They repelled multiple assaults on the causeways. But the siege cut off Tenochtitlan's fresh water supply (the aqueduct from Chapultepec was destroyed), and smallpox had already killed a large portion of the population. Defenders drank brackish lake water. Starvation took those the disease spared.
The Nahua informants recorded the aftermath. "The people of the city had to walk upon their dead." The Spanish tore down the Templo Mayor. They melted the gold ornaments. They enslaved survivors. Cuauhtémoc was tortured (his feet were burned with oil) to reveal the location of hidden treasure. He revealed nothing. Cortés kept him alive as a puppet ruler for four years, then hanged him during an expedition to Honduras in 1525, on suspicion of plotting a revolt. Cuauhtémoc's last recorded words: "I knew what it was to trust your false promises."
Arguments
- The Aztecs fought a determined 80-day defense against overwhelming odds compounded by disease
- The Toxcatl massacre was an unprovoked slaughter that ended any possibility of coexistence
- Moctezuma's diplomacy was strategic statecraft, not the superstitious paralysis Spanish accounts describe
- The destruction of Tenochtitlan was the destruction of a civilization, not merely a military defeat
Sources
- The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico
- Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, Book XII
- Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
indigenousTlaxcalan / Indigenous Ally
Tlaxcala
The third account was suppressed for four hundred years, and it belongs to the people who supplied most of the army.
The Tlaxcalans did not think they had joined a Spanish conquest. They thought they had recruited a Spanish contingent into a Tlaxcalan war, and the terms they negotiated said so.
They recorded it themselves, in a painted history made in their own city, showing their commanders leading, their soldiers fighting, and the Spaniards present as part of a combined force.
For most of the next four centuries the Spanish narrative had no room for that, and the Mexican national story that came later had less. In it the Tlaxcalans stop being an independent state defending itself and become traitors to a nation that did not exist yet.
Read the full account
Narrative
Tlaxcala had been at war with the Aztec Triple Alliance for decades. The "Flower Wars" (ritualized conflicts designed to capture sacrificial victims) were, for the Tlaxcalans, an existential siege. The Aztecs blockaded Tlaxcala, denying it access to salt, cotton, and cacao. Tlaxcalan soldiers wore cotton armor while their Aztec opponents wore the feathered suits that only access to tropical trade could provide. When Cortés arrived on Tlaxcalan territory in September 1519, the Tlaxcalans fought him first: four battles in two weeks. Xicoténcatl the Younger, the leading military commander, argued for continued resistance. He was overruled. The Tlaxcalan senate chose alliance.
The alliance was not subordination. The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, a colonial-era pictorial document created by Tlaxcalan artists, depicts Tlaxcalan warriors as equal partners in every major battle. At the siege of Tenochtitlan, Tlaxcalan soldiers outnumbered Spaniards by ratios of 80 to 1 or higher. They built the 13 brigantines that gave Cortés control of Lake Texcoco; 8,000 Tlaxcalan porters carried the disassembled ships over the mountains from Tlaxcala to Texcoco. They provided the logistical infrastructure (food, porters, intelligence) without which the Spanish expedition would have starved in the highlands.
Tlaxcala extracted a price. After the conquest, Tlaxcala was granted special privileges: exemption from tribute, retention of its own governing council, the right to use the title "Loyal City." Tlaxcalan colonists were sent throughout New Spain as auxiliaries of Spanish expansion: to Guatemala, to the Philippines, to the Chichimeca frontier. They carried a document, the Actas de Cabildo, recording their services to the Crown. For a century, these privileges held. Then the colonial bureaucracy eroded them. By the 1600s, Tlaxcalans paid tribute like other indigenous groups. Their special status survived only in legal petitions and local memory.
Xicoténcatl the Younger, the commander who had opposed the alliance, was hanged by Cortés during the siege of Tenochtitlan, accused of desertion. Tlaxcalan sources treat him as a prophet: the man who foresaw that the Spanish would consume their allies as they had consumed their enemies. The Tlaxcalan perspective complicates the conquest narrative entirely. The fall of Tenochtitlan was not a European triumph over an American civilization. It was a Mesoamerican civil war in which one side had Spanish weapons, Spanish diseases, and a Spanish narrative that would write the other side out of history.
Arguments
- Tlaxcalans provided the majority of the military force that defeated the Aztec empire
- The alliance was a rational strategic decision against Aztec imperial oppression, not naivety
- Spanish narratives erased Tlaxcalan agency and contribution for centuries
- The conquest was a Mesoamerican civil war with Spanish catalysts, not a European victory over American peoples
Sources
- The Lienzo de Tlaxcala
- Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Allies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica
- Tlaxcala: The Rise and Fall of an Indian Republic
bystanderCatholic Mission
The Catholic mission
The fourth account belongs to the friars, and it contains the sharpest contradiction in the whole episode.
The first twelve Franciscans walked barefoot from the coast in fifteen twenty four. Cortes knelt to them in public, which astonished Aztec nobles who had never seen him kneel to anything.
Their project was total conversion, and they went at it at industrial speed. One of them recorded baptising fourteen thousand people in a single day.
They pulled down the temples and burned the books. Of the thousands of Aztec codices that existed before the conquest, perhaps fifteen or twenty survive. A Franciscan bishop further south burned every Maya book he could find in a single afternoon in fifteen sixty two, and four of those are left.
And the single greatest surviving record of that civilisation is a two thousand four hundred page encyclopedia compiled over forty years by one of the same order. The institution that erased it is the institution that preserved it.
The order also produced the other argument. A Dominican who had watched the Caribbean population destroyed published a catalogue of Spanish atrocities in fifteen fifty two and then argued, in a formal debate before the crown, that indigenous people were rational beings with rights. The man arguing against him held that they were natural slaves.
Read the full account
Narrative
The first twelve Franciscan friars arrived in Mexico in May 1524, walking barefoot from Veracruz to Mexico City. Cortés knelt before them, a staged act of piety that astonished the watching Aztec nobility, who had never seen the conqueror kneel before anyone. The friars' mission was total conversion. Within a decade, they claimed to have baptized millions. Fray Toribio de Benavente, who took the Nahuatl name Motolinía ("the poor one"), recorded baptizing 14,000 people in a single day at Xochimilco.
The paradox of the Franciscan mission was that the same institution that destroyed Aztec civilization also preserved more of it than any other. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún spent 40 years compiling the Florentine Codex, a 2,400-page encyclopedia of Aztec culture, religion, natural history, and daily life, recorded in Nahuatl with Spanish commentary. It is the most comprehensive ethnographic document of any pre-Columbian civilization. Sahagún trained Nahua students at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco (founded in 1536, the first European-style school of higher education in the Americas) and relied on their knowledge to compile his work. The students became scholars, translators, and administrators. They also became Christians, or at least performed Christianity with sufficient conviction to navigate the colonial system.
Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar who had witnessed the destruction of the Caribbean indigenous population, published A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies in 1552. The book catalogued Spanish atrocities with gruesome specificity: mass burnings, enslavement, the feeding of indigenous children to war dogs. Las Casas argued that indigenous peoples were rational beings with natural rights, a position he defended in the Valladolid Debate of 1550-51 against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who held that indigenous peoples were "natural slaves" under Aristotelian philosophy. The debate produced no clear verdict, but Las Casas's arguments influenced the New Laws of 1542, which restricted (though did not eliminate) the encomienda system.
The mission narrative is one of salvation complicated by complicity. The friars genuinely opposed the worst abuses of the encomenderos. They also presided over the destruction of thousands of Aztec codices, religious objects, and temple complexes. Diego de Landa, the Franciscan bishop of Yucatán, burned every Maya codex he could find in July 1562 at the auto-da-fé of Maní, destroying an entire civilization's written record. Only four Maya codices survive. The Aztec codices fare slightly better: perhaps 15-20 pre-conquest documents survive, out of thousands that existed. What we know of Aztec civilization, we know largely through the lens of the people who destroyed it.
Arguments
- The Franciscan mission preserved more of Aztec civilization than any other colonial institution
- Las Casas's advocacy established the principle that indigenous peoples had natural rights
- Mass conversion provided indigenous peoples a path to survival within the colonial system
- The mission was both the destroyer and the archivist of pre-Columbian knowledge
Sources
- A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
- Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain
- The Conquest of New Spain
academicModern Mexican Identity
Modern Mexico
The fifth account is about a country living on top of the evidence.
In seventeen ninety, workers digging drainage under the main square of Mexico City hit a carved stone twelve feet across and twenty four tons in weight. It was the Aztec sun stone, buried after the conquest. They propped it against the cathedral wall and left it there for decades.
The cathedral is built with stones from the great temple. The main square is the Aztec ceremonial precinct. The national museum is in a park where the aqueducts began.
And the modern national story takes the empire that lost as the ancestor, which is a choice about which indigenous past counts, made by a state that spent centuries not making it.
Read the full account
Narrative
In 1790, workers laying drainage pipes under Mexico City's central plaza struck a massive carved stone. It was the Sun Stone: the Aztec calendar, 12 feet across and 24 tons, buried by the Spanish after the conquest. It was propped against the cathedral wall, where it remained for decades. In 1964, it was moved to the National Museum of Anthropology, where it occupies the central gallery. The museum itself sits in Chapultepec Park, the hill where Aztec aqueducts once began. Mexico City is built on the bones of Tenochtitlan. The cathedral stands on stones from the Templo Mayor. The zócalo, the main plaza, was the Aztec ceremonial precinct. In 1978, electrical workers accidentally uncovered the Coyolxauhqui stone, and the resulting excavation revealed the Templo Mayor itself, buried under four centuries of colonial construction.
Mexican national identity is constructed on a contradiction. The official narrative (taught in schools, inscribed on murals, embodied in the 1910 Revolution) celebrates both the Aztec past and the Spanish colonial heritage. The monument to Cuauhtémoc stands on the Paseo de la Reforma, Mexico City's grand boulevard. Two blocks away stands a monument to Columbus. The National Palace, seat of government, contains Diego Rivera's mural cycle depicting the conquest as atrocity, the pre-Columbian world as civilization, and the Revolution as redemption. Rivera painted Cortés as a syphilitic hunchback. He painted La Malinche as a beauty holding a mestizo child.
La Malinche occupies the center of the contradiction. In one reading, she is the traitor, the woman who gave the conqueror her language and her body, enabling the destruction of her own people. "Malinchismo" (cultural betrayal, preference for the foreign) remains a term of insult in Mexican Spanish. In another reading, she is the founder, the mother of the first mestizo generation, the woman who navigated between two worlds and created a third. Octavio Paz, in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), called her "La Chingada" (the violated one) and argued that Mexican identity was built on the unresolved trauma of conquest: "The sons of La Malinche."
The academic perspective holds that mestizaje, the blending of Spanish and indigenous bloodlines and cultures, is both Mexico's defining achievement and its founding lie. The celebration of racial mixture conceals an ongoing racial hierarchy. Indigenous peoples in Mexico (12 million by government count, 25 million by self-identification) remain disproportionately poor. In Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero, indigenous communities live at material standards comparable to the poorest nations in the hemisphere. The Aztec past is celebrated in museums and murals; the indigenous present is marginalized in policy and practice. The conquest is not over. It was reclassified.
Arguments
- Mexican identity is built on the unresolved contradiction of celebrating both conquest and pre-Columbian civilization
- La Malinche embodies the ambiguity (traitor and founder, victim and agent)
- Mestizaje ideology celebrates mixture while concealing ongoing racial hierarchy
- The physical city of Mexico City is the living archaeology of conquest; Tenochtitlan lies beneath
Sources
- The Labyrinth of Solitude
- Mexico Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization
- Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs
The turn
What each account has to leave out.
The conquistadors' account leaves out the size of the army it commanded. Five hundred is the number of Spaniards, not the number of soldiers, and the god story does the work of explaining a victory the arithmetic will not.
From the record
Indigenous allies who constituted the vast majority of the conquering armyEpidemic disease as the decisive factor in demographic collapseDestruction of Aztec libraries, codices, and cultural heritageEconomic motivations, gold and encomienda labor, driving the expeditionThe Mexica account is a translation twice over: collected decades late, through a friar, from people living under the people who beat them. It is the only version of their side that exists, and its conditions are written into every page.
From the record
Aztec imperial practices (tribute extraction, human sacrifice) that alienated subject peoplesTlaxcalan and other indigenous agency in choosing alliance with SpainInternal divisions within the Aztec Triple AlliancePost-conquest Nahua adaptation and cultural survival strategiesThe Tlaxcalan account is right that they chose, and it is quieter about the fact that the choice was made by a state under blockade by an empire that took its people for sacrifice. A decision under those conditions is still a decision, and it is not a free one.
From the record
Devastation suffered by all indigenous peoples including Tlaxcalans from European diseasesTlaxcalan participation in violence against other indigenous groups during and after conquestLong-term consequences of enabling European colonizationInternal Tlaxcalan debate and divisions over the allianceThe friars' account is unusable as a moral position and indispensable as a source, and it cannot hold both of those at once.
From the record
Mass destruction of codices, temples, and religious objects by the same missionsForced conversion and the erasure of indigenous spiritual practicesThe role of mission schools in cultural assimilation and colonial controlDiego de Landa's destruction of Maya codices, the most catastrophic cultural loss in the AmericasAnd the modern account is a national identity assembled out of ruins. It puts the sun stone at the centre of the national museum and it has never settled what to do with the Tlaxcalans, or with the woman who translated for Cortes, who is a traitor and a mother of a nation in the same breath.
From the record
Spanish colonial contributions to Mexican culture, architecture, and lawAgency of indigenous peoples in shaping post-conquest societyRegional diversity of indigenous experience beyond the Aztec-centric narrativeEconomic and political factors beyond ethnic identity in shaping modern inequality
Close
The city fell on the thirteenth of August, fifteen twenty one.
Within a century, the population of central Mexico had gone from about twenty five million people to about one million. Most of that was disease, and disease is not a policy, and the conquest is what put it into a population with no immunity to any of it.
Mexico City was built directly on top of the wreckage, using its stone.
And in nineteen seventy eight, electrical workers digging behind that cathedral hit another carved stone. It was the great temple. It had been eight feet under the traffic the entire time.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 1519April 1519
- Killed
- 240K+ during the siege alone; indigenous population of…
- Displaced
- 25Mindigenous people in Mesoamerica
- Place
- Mexico
Key figures
- Hernán CortésLeader of the Spanish expedition, self-appointed captain-general1485 to 1547
- Moctezuma IITlatoani (ruler) of the Aztec Triple Alliance at Spanish arrival1466 to 1520
- CuauhtémocLast Aztec tlatoani, led 80-day defense of Tenochtitlan, executed by Cortés in 15251497 to 1525
- La Malinche (Doña Marina)Nahua translator and advisor to Cortés, mother of one of the first mestizo children1500 to 1529
- Pedro de AlvaradoSpanish lieutenant, perpetrated the Toxcatl massacre1485 to 1541
- Xicoténcatl the YoungerTlaxcalan military commander who opposed the alliance with Cortés1484 to 1521
Primary sources
· The True History of the Conquest of New Spain · 1568
“We were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadís, on account of the great towers and temples and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry.”
· The True History of the Conquest of New Spain · 1568
“The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others swam or drowned in the waters of that wide lake. So great was the suffering that it was beyond understanding.”
· Florentine Codex, Book XII (recorded by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún) · c. 1577
“They seized the gold as if they were monkeys, their faces flushed. Like hungry pigs they craved that gold.”
Threads
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- The Khmer EmpireLIDAR revealed a city larger than modern Paris, buried under jungle since 1431. No one had noticed the canals.